The case for co-sleeping

It can hinder your sex life, and it's a bit cramped, but sharing your bed with your child is the most natural thing in the world, says Victoria Lambert (who makes do with half a pillow and a one-foot wide strip of mattress ... )

My husband was off to Berlin for 10 weeks, so I had looked forward to a little more room in the bed at nights. But a couple of evenings ago, when I asked Rowena, my three-year-old daughter, to move up an inch, she refused. "That's Daddy's bit," she replied. "We need to leave it for when he gets back."

With a weary sigh, I put my head back on my allotted half pillow, found my 1ft-wide strip of bed and rolled over. Rowena stretched out - as ever - and luxuriated across the middle. And thus it has been, pretty much since she was born.

For we are a family of co-sleepers - members of a rather furtive tribe who hardly dare own up in public to such an unfashionable practice, at odds with the modern, routine-based childcare experts who think that children are best settled in their own rooms as early as possible to make them independent.

Yet is our night-time routine - bath, stories, then at least two and sometimes all three of us into the big bed at 8.30pm, with the grown-ups sneaking out later to tiptoe downstairs for Newsnight - so bizarre? While the supernannies of modern England would chastise us for our poor habits, deliberate co-sleeping - not just children sneaking into Mummy and Daddy's bed when they think they can get away with it - is a practice as old as parenting itself. And it's arguably more natural than the current preoccupation with separating ourselves from our young.

Co-sleeping is undoubtedly influenced by culture - in many parts of the world it is still the norm, not the exception. It was the Victorians who set the ground rules for children sleeping in their own bedrooms. According to the historian Nelleke Bakker: "Character formation was considered the most important goal of child-rearing."

Cuddling and night lights were out, separate rooms and formality were in.

Incredibly, it was not until the early 70s that anyone challenged this way of parenting. When Jean Liedloff, an American writer, spent two-and-a-half years living in the South American jungle with the Yequana Indians, she found a way of life that changed her perspective on human nature. Her book based on her experiences, The Continuum Concept, quickly attracted attention for the way it encouraged parents to adopt a style that owed everything to their long-dead ancestors rather than the more recent ones.

Liedloff believed that infants should be carried constantly until they naturally choose to start crawling, that breastfeeding should be on demand and that babies should sleep with their parents until they choose to leave. This, she maintained, would help them become strong, independent adults. Attachment parenting - as this style of parenting was dubbed - has certainly proved popular with some and was followed up in the UK by Deborah Jackson's Three in a Bed in 1989.

For Veronika Robinson and her husband, Paul, co-sleeping has been an "integral part of our parenting". The couple, who live in Cumbria and co-edit The Mother magazine, have two daughters, Bethany, 12, and Eliza, 10. "We slept with them both from day one," says Veronika. "It was always our intention to co-sleep."

During her first pregnancy, Veronika recalls being shown a "really lovely cradle", but after reading The Continuum Concept she and Paul decided this was how they would parent their own offspring. It went against her German background, where children were definitely unwelcome in the parental bedroom. "Before then I suppose I hadn't given it much thought. But the more I learned about what a baby needs," says Veronika, "the more I was sure that the only place my baby should be was in bed with me. Anything else seemed cruel."

Bethany was born in a home water- birth in March 1996 and a few hours later Veronika and Paul took her into bed with them. "She slept with us from then on. We had an independent midwife so there was no one to tell us not to or be disapproving."

Two years later, Eliza arrived in January 1998, born by water-birth in hospital. The couple took every opportunity to hold their infant in the unit before Eliza was allowed to join her mother on the ward. "As soon as I got her, I put her in my bed. The nurses warned, 'She'll fall out,' so I dragged the mattress off the bed and on to the floor and we slept there. I don't think the hospital had seen anything like it."

From then on, the four slept together at home across two double mattresses on the floor of the couple's room. "I was breastfeeding both children so it was much easier. I can't imagine how I would have coped had I had to get up to see to each one in different rooms when they needed me. And Paul was there to help with the nappies."

There was the odd uncomfortable night: "I can remember in the very early days lying there unable to get to sleep because I was next to three snorers," says Veronika, with a laugh.

The girls finally left the big bed for their own beds and rooms when each was about five, although this was a fairly fluid arrangement. "It took me a few years to adjust," says Veronika. "But Eliza still sleeps with me some nights, although now the girls are bigger, there isn't so much room, so Paul has to swap for her bed. It's like musical beds here sometimes. People say children who co-sleep will become clingy, but we believe when children get a secure foundation, when their needs are met, they grow up to be secure."

Yet there are serious critics of co-sleeping. Most modern child-rearing experts suggest that babies are best put in a separate cot for the first six months but kept in the parents' room to lessen the risk of cot death - advice given by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Royal College of Midwives.

But when my own daughter was a few months old and I wasn't quite so frightened of rolling over and squashing her, I found myself breastfeeding at night in bed and then "forgetting" to put Rowena back in her cot. Hearing her soft breath was much more reassuring than my former habit of sneaking over to poke her to check she was still alive. More importantly, she slept better and deeper than in the cot - and so did I.

Aware of public health advice, I mentioned to my midwife that we had returned to co-sleeping, only to be roundly cautioned. I was putting my child at risk, I was told. If we could make her go to bed and sleep through, we wouldn't need to co-sleep.

Much modern guidance on the matter differentiates between bed-sharing (good) and co-sleeping (bad). According to Unicef's Baby Friendly Initiative (babyfriendly.org.uk): "Bed-sharing encourages intimate contact between mother and baby, which facilitates a close and loving bond. Successful breastfeeding and better sleep are more common among mothers and babies who share the same bed. Evidence suggests that bed-sharing is common among parents with new babies both in hospital and at home."

But by this, they don't mean the mother falling asleep too - not unless baby is sleeping in a cot clipped on to the bed. The report warns: "In certain circumstances, mothers who bed-share may fall asleep whether they intend to [or not]. There is evidence to indicate that co-sleeping is associated with a greater incidence of accident or sudden infant death where certain risk factors are present." Of particular concern is the link between smokers and cot death and the danger that if you fall asleep drunk or drugged, you may fail to notice where - or on what - you are lying.

Thoroughly ashamed and wary of the danger, my husband and I tried gentle routines. We tried baths and bottles and Beethoven, we tried controlled crying and spent one awful night listening to our little baby scream herself physically sick. In the end, it was too much. Rowena left the cot and came back into the big bed. Friends and acquaintances seemed genuinely shocked that we would want her in our bed. "How will she learn to be independent?" was that oft-repeated Victorian-sounding fear.

We were lucky - unlike many, we had lots of support. My mother revealed that she had co-slept with my father, my two sisters and myself for years and that she had never banished a cot from the bedroom. My sister-in-law also revealed that her children had spent most nights in her marital bed.

Instinct drove 38-year-old Michelle Burfitt, a secondary-school teacher from Swindon, to bring her son Rhys (now aged two) into bed when he was just two days old. Having gone through an unwanted caesarean in April 2006, when she heard her son cry out at night in the hospital, she didn't waste time buzzing for help as instructed. She just leant over and picked him up by his pyjamas.

The midwife who arrived in her room not long after was horrified - "You'll have ruined him by morning," she announced. Michelle admits that even though she knew this sentiment was an overreaction, she still felt bad. "I was flabbergasted," she admits.

Michelle followed the WHO advice for the first six months, keeping Rhys in a cot close to the bed she shares with her husband, John, 46. After seven months, she tried to move him into his own room. By eight months, his sleep had become so disturbed he was waking 15 times in a night.

She adds: "I read so many books and stressed myself. Looking back, I now think he was such a tiny thing, why would I want to separate myself from him anyway? As a society we want children to be integrated with our schedule and we miss the point and the value of having them." John took matters into his own hands and built a co-sleeper platform for their bed: a three-sided cot that could take a mattress. "It was such a joy waking up with him and beside him," she says. "Those memories are something I'll cherish."

But Michelle, too, was finding it an awkward subject with other mothers. "Some seemed to measure success as 'sleeping through the night in their own beds'. Sleep always seemed to be the first topic of conversation when you met up, and I didn't want to talk about it."

She has heard, too, as I have, some couples' concerns that their own time for intimacy will be lost if at least one child is always snoring away in the middle of the bed. "You make other times," she says, patiently, "and intimacy doesn't always include sex."

Meanwhile, I have finally been able to own up to the truth: I like co-sleeping. I find it a natural way to parent, I find it easy to soothe my child when she's unwell and our breathing seems to calm each other down into instant sleep. Instinctively, and perhaps controversially, I also feel that as a working mother I am somehow making up for the lost daylight hours by being around her at night.

Even on those nights when I have been edged out of bed almost completely, I don't complain about the way we sleep. "When she does sleep in her own room," warns my husband, "you'll be sorry." And I will.